"Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it." Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. {r}evolution

Our mission is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities. Through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals we foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Questions for Detroit Works By Shea Howell

Thinking for ourselves

Questions for Detroit Works

By Shea Howell

January 26, – Feb 2, 2013

In the last days of his first term, President Barack Obama held a press conference. He spoke about the violence that has become a normal part of children’s lives. He said protecting our children should be our highest priority, the way we will be judged as a people. “It is our responsibility to care for them,” he said. “To shield them from harm. To give them the tools they need to grow up and do everything that they are capable of doing, not just to pursue their own dreams, but to help build this country.”

This kind of thinking is critical as we face the future. It is sadly lacking in much of our public life, especially here in Detroit. Nowhere is the absence clearer than when you attempt to figure out what the newly unveiled Detroit Works plan actually means.

While providing a wealth of good ideas, important facts, and innovative strategies, it gives us no direction for making choices between competing interests. Some of this is because the effort to engage citizens and organizations in developing the plan produced multiple strategies, sometimes at odds with one another.

But there is a deeper problem that rests both on how this project was conceived and how it was paid for. The primary understanding of the city that undergirds the plan was that the city is shrinking. It has too few people to maintain itself. Although there are many references to our assets, ingenuity, and creativity, the dominant thread is that Detroit was once 2million. Now we have to figure out how the few of us left will deal with a place larger than its people.

There is no real sense in the plan that Detroit is poised on the cusp of a dramatic shifting of global trends, moving from the old industrial epoch to something very new. In this transformational moment, we have the opportunity to conceive anew the role of cities, of urban life, and modes of production. For the first time in perhaps eons, we do not have to shape our cities for mass, industrial production. Rather we can ask, “What kind of city best protects and develops our children?” What kind of city will help them “grow up and do everything that they are capable of doing, not just to pursue their own dreams but to help build this country?”

If we take this question seriously, it leads us down a very different path when we face choices of what to create, what to repair, what to reinvent, what to carry to the future, and what to leave behind.

It is precisely the question that the young women of the Catherine Ferguson Academy have been asking themselves. Under the leadership of their visionary principal, Asenath Andrews, and the imagination of Blair Evans, who rescued the school from closing, these young women are beginning an intentional village on the west side. Over the next year, they will build a village to raise themselves and their children, creating new forms of work, new methods of providing food and culture, new ways of making energy and decisions. It will be joined on the east side by a Creative Community, also created by young people from the ground up, providing a space for the development of their imaginations as they tackle the multitude of questions in the building of a community.

These two projects stand in contrast to corporate driven development. They begin with a recognition that the questions we ask are more important than the technical knowledge we bring to bear.

The words of President Obama remind us that our responsibility is to not just to rebuild our city, but to reimagine it as a place where all of our children will learn, grow, and be able to contribute to the creation of new ways of living with one another and our earth.

ON Being Krista Tippet

ON Being Krista Tippet
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
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Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214

James and Grace Lee boggs Center To Nurture community Leadership
hpp//www.boggscenter.org / {r}evolution - the two side non-violent revolution in values.
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.